Selling online used to be straightforward. List your products, ship your orders, collect your money. Not anymore. Today’s e-commerce sellers spend as much time managing platform compliance as they do running their actual business.
The big marketplaces have gotten paranoid about fraud (and honestly, who can blame them). Juniper Research projects global e-commerce fraud will hit $107 billion by 2029. That kind of number makes platforms nervous, and nervous platforms crack down hard on sellers.
Verification Requirements Keep Stacking Up
Getting approved to sell on Amazon or eBay now feels like applying for a mortgage. You’ll need government ID, utility bills proving your address, bank account verification, tax documents, and sometimes a video call with a platform representative. Miss one step or upload a blurry document? Back to square one.
The INFORM Consumers Act made things even tighter in 2023. If you’re a high-volume seller (200+ sales or $5,000 in revenue annually), platforms must verify your identity and display your information publicly. That’s federal law now, not just platform policy.
Here’s where it gets frustrating. Lose access to your account for any reason, and all that verification data works against you. The MarsProxies guide to eBay multiple accounts walks through why recovery is so tough once you’re flagged. Your bank details, your address, your device fingerprints: they’re all linked to the suspended account.
Real Businesses Need Room to Operate
Most platforms assume one seller equals one account. That works fine for someone clearing out their garage. It doesn’t work for serious e-commerce operations.
Think about it. You might want separate accounts for different product lines, or need to keep your wholesale business distinct from retail. Maybe you’re testing a new niche and don’t want to risk your main account’s standing. These are normal business decisions, but platforms treat any account overlap like criminal activity.
Wikipedia’s page on identity verification services explains how these systems grew out of banking compliance requirements. Banks needed to prevent money laundering, so they built identity verification tools. E-commerce platforms borrowed those tools without really adapting them for how retail businesses actually work.
Geographic restrictions make things worse. A seller based in Chicago who sources from Germany and sells to customers in Japan needs to interact with platforms from multiple locations. But log in from an unexpected IP address and you might trigger a security review that freezes your account for weeks.
The Detection Game
Platforms don’t just check your documents anymore. They track everything: where you log in, what browser you use, how fast you type, which listings you view before making changes.
Mastercard’s fraud research found that North America accounts for 42% of global e-commerce fraud. With numbers like that, platforms figure aggressive detection is worth the collateral damage. Some innocent sellers get caught? Cost of doing business.
The problem is these systems generate tons of false positives. Travel for a trade show and access your account from a hotel? Suspicious. Use your laptop at a coffee shop with shared WiFi? Suspicious. Have an employee help manage listings from their home? You guessed it.
What Actually Works
Sellers who stay ahead of these challenges treat their digital presence like infrastructure, not an afterthought.
ISP proxies give you IP addresses that look like regular home internet connections. Platforms can easily spot datacenter IPs (the cheap kind that come from server farms), but residential-grade connections blend in with normal traffic. This matters when you need consistent access from specific geographic locations.
The FTC’s INFORM Act guidance spells out the 10-day window platforms have to verify seller information. Once that clock starts, you’re racing against automatic suspension. Having your documentation ready and your access methods sorted before problems arise saves enormous headaches.
Build separation into your operations from day one. Keep different business functions on different networks when possible. Document why you’ve structured things the way you have. If you ever need to appeal a suspension, “I was testing products for a new category” sounds a lot better than scrambling to explain after the fact.
Where This Is Heading
Platform enforcement will probably get stricter, not looser. The FTC hit Temu with a $2 million fine in September 2025 for INFORM Act violations. That sends a clear message to every marketplace: verify your sellers properly or face consequences.
Sellers who figure out identity management now will have a real edge. The ones who ignore it will keep getting blindsided by suspensions they didn’t see coming. It’s not the most exciting part of running an e-commerce business, but it might be the most important.